The Sun Also Rises Book 2, Chapter 10 Summary

Bill, Jake, and Cohn have breakfast and, around about midmorning, start drinking. They rent a car to leave Bayonne for the river to fish. It’s hot out and the landscape is beautiful and distinctly Spanish.

We discover that Jake is the only one of the three who can semi-competently speak Spanish.

They stop in a small town, find a hotel, and have a lunch of hors d’oeuvres, an egg course, two meat courses, vegetables, salad, desert, and fruit. Oh and lots of wine which is justified as necessary to digesting the rest. We’re still hungry.

Cohn is acting super awkward because he doesn’t know if Jake and Bill know that he was in San Sebastian with Brett. Cohn’s Spanish is particularly atrocious.

Jake, Bill, and Cohn go off separately for a while. Jake prays (sort of, at least) in the Catholic Church in the square. Mostly he thinks about bull-fights.

During dinner, Cohn and Jake leave to check if Brett and Mike have arrived at the train station. Cohn is nervous. Jake, in a particularly nasty mood, lets him suffer, then accuses Cohn of bringing out the worst in everyone. Mike and Brett don’t show up on the train. Jake receives a telegram saying that they have decided to spend the night in San Sebastian. He pulls a catty middle-school-girl maneuver and doesn’t show Cohn the telegram.

Jake’s jealousy has transformed his feelings for Cohn – while he showed fondness for Cohn (albeit condescendingly) in earlier chapters, now he admits that he hates the other guy. Clearly Brett is the cause.

Jake buys bus tickets to Burguete, where they plan to fish. Cohn bails, claiming that he should go meet Brett and Mike in San Sebastian. Bill and Jake are both fed up with him, and the nasty strain of anti-Semitism that’s been lurking in the background of the novel all along emerges.